Allegory’s Transformations in Postmodern Literature and Art

Abstract

Considering postmodern allegory in its historical context, this chapter revisits Paul de Man’s essays and their critical reception in literary and art theory to trace the series of manoeuvres through which allegory was redefined as a nonhermeneutic, nontranscendental, self-referential mode. It shows how de Man identified allegory with irony, a historically novel move that rendered allegory representative of the failure of reading and the impossibility of stable reference. This chapter explores the consequences of these critical shifts by examining postmodern allegorical fiction in dialogue with concurrent developments in the visual arts. I argue that the postmodern transformation of allegory from a mode of structured correspondence to one of severed reference constitutes the twentieth century’s most radical and influential revision of allegory’s form and function.